Mental Illness - the other Drug War

Many years ago I had the honor of working part-time in a psychiatric hospital. I was 20 years old. By the time I finished I didn’t have many illusions left about human nature. I have stories to tell that would make you throw up.

I also came away with a suspicion of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and nursing staff who talked of “chemical imbalances” and pushed medications on depressed patients. I concede I know a few who seem to have benefited from them – lithium as a mood-stabilizer, for example - but most depressed people I have known came out of it sooner or later, if it was left to time to heal the pain and their circumstances gradually improved. A little therapy here and there can reassure the anxious and the angry. But all the ones I knew who upped the medications sadly drowned in them eventually.

If you were to say, “What do you know? You’re not a psychiatrist” well, three new books confirm my impressions (see NY Review of Books here).

The reviewer, Marcia Angell, opens with this statement: “It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it.” She then goes on to ask: “Are we simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one? And what about the drugs that are now the mainstay of treatment? Do they work? If they do, shouldn’t we expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising?”

Exactly. The whole article is worth a read but the two most interesting arguments made by the books are these: (1) There is no statistically significant difference in effectiveness between patients on anti-depressants and those on placebos, although the drug companies have hidden this; (2) Anti-psychotic drugs may make things much worse by creating the chemical imbalances, turning episodic conditions into chronic ones: “Prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known ‘chemical imbalance.’ However, once a person is put on a psychiatric medication, which, in one manner or another, throws a wrench into the usual mechanics of a neuronal pathway, his or her brain begins to function…abnormally.” (This last is a quote from one of the books.)

You have to read the article – and perhaps consider ordering the books – to see the full horror of this obscene Drug War.

Image: A study by Salvador Dalí for Hitchcock’s Spellbound.